Marijuana questions dominate White House online chat -- again
iStockphoto
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET
President Obama's live, online chat slated for Monday afternoon is intended to focus on issues raised during last week's State of the Union address -- but his online audience seems to be much more interested in marijuana policy.
Following Mr. Obama's State of the Union address, the White House invited voters to submit questions to the president via YouTube. The president plans on answering some of those questions during a 45-minute "hangout" session on on Google's social networking site Google Plus. In the "hangout" session, Mr. Obama will chat from the West Wing with some of the voters who submitted questions. The chat will be streamed live on YouTube and WhiteHouse.gov at 5:30 p.m. ET.
According to the White House's YouTube page, 133,216 questions were submitted for the discussion (voting is now closed). YouTube visitors could give the questions a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" rating, and more than 1.6 million votes were cast.
Sorting the questions by popularity reveals that 18 of the 20 most popular questions, according to YouTube, have something to do with marijuana policy, including the legalization of marijuana use, the cost of the war on drugs and other related issues.
Questions about marijuana policy have dominated multiple online engagement efforts from the Obama White House. In fact, the second-most popular question for today's "hangout" comes from a retired police officer with the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) -- just as it did in Mr. Obama's 2011 YouTube chat.
Tom Angell, media relations director for LEAP, says that his organization took simple steps to mobilize support for this year's video question.
"We recorded the video, put it up online... sent the link to our supporters on Faceook and Twitter, and from there people took it into their own hands," Angell told Hotsheet. "All told, the whole thing consisted of three Facebook posts and three tweets -- that's it."
Angell said he's surprised he hasn't witnessed similar mobilization efforts from other advocacy groups.
"It only takes a few thousand votes from supporters to get something to the top in these competitions," he said. "I'm sure PETA has a much bigger email list than we have."
That said, he thinks marijuana policy questions resonate more for a couple of different reasons. For one thing, young people tend to support marijuana legalization more than other age groups and are also more familiar with social media use.
Secondly, drug policy certainly isn't the top issue on voters' minds, Angell said, but it is "the number one concern which is not being addressed at all in any serious way by policy makers."
In the 2011 YouTube discussion, Mr. Obama said he is not in favor of drug legalization. However, acknowledging that the "war on drugs" has not been effective, he said he thinks of drugs as "more of a public health problem." In a 2010 online discussion, he ignored the question. In 2009, Mr. Obama seemed to laugh off the question after stating his opposition to marijuana legalization.
Angell said LEAP was "somewhat pleased" with the president's answer last year. "He basically said legalization is an entirely legitimate topic," Angell said, in what was perhaps the "first time a sitting president has said we can talk about this."
While the president opposes the legalization of marijuana, half of all Americans said it should be made legal in an October Gallup poll while 46 percent said it should stay illegal.
Though most of the popular questions submitted for today's discussion related to marijuana policy, the top question is about copyright infringement -- another hot topic on the Internet. The top question asks the president, "Why are you personally supporting the extradition UK Citizen Richard O'Dwyer for solely linking to copyright infringing works using an Extradition Treaty designed to combat terrorism and to bring terrorists to Judgement in the USA?"
Popular in Politics
- Obama forgets to salute while boarding Marine One Play Video
- The Ted Cruz conundrum
- Petraeus biographer regrets affair
- Senators lack votes on immigration despite progress
- As summer approaches, sequestration threatens holiday fun
- Senator: Oklahoma "hit hard, but we're not knocked out"
- IRS' Lerner was asked to resign, refused: GOP Sen. 204 Comments
- GOP Rep.: Obama elected because of Reagan's immigration reforms
"The county was expected to get tremendous revenue from medical-marijuana dispensaries, and when the feds came in, the county stopped their progress," said criminal-defense attorney Mark Reichel, who counts a number of dispensary operators as clients.
Reichel says the county expected to collect a figure similar to the $1.5 million the city of Sacramento had annually received through its licensing of medical-marijuana operators. But with that revenue stream presently dammed up by federal intervention, the county is back to favoring that other intoxicating vice.
County officials deny they're ginning-up alcohol-related businesses during distressed times. After all, the county doesn't decide who gets most off-sale (for consumption off the premises) liquor licenses. That responsibility falls mainly to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. But local municipalities get to weigh in on off-sale liquor licenses when they're being proposed in high-crime neighborhoods or areas where there's already an undue concentration of alcohol-related businesses.
But more liquor licenses were approved for Sacramento County's most booze-impacted neighborhoods in 2011 than in any of the past five years.
A lack of community opposition may be one reason oversaturated communities and neighborhoods with high crime rates are targeted, said Sacramento State sociology professor Jacqueline Carrigan, an expert on the subjects of drugs and alcohol, and social class and inequality.
These neighborhoods are more likely to be "disadvantaged in many other ways, so the liquor-store owners may face less resistance from the citizens of the neighborhood when they try to open up there," she posited. Conversely, neighborhoods with more affluent and politically connected residents are better positioned to resist such businesses, Carrigan added.
Law-enforcement agencies can't track the public-safety impacts of liquor licensees the way they used to, because of budget and personnel losses. But there's evidence of a likely increase in criminal activity in neighborhoods with a large number of liquor stores.
"Neighborhoods with more alcohol outlets do have more violence than those without, even when controlling for other neighborhood characteristics, such as poverty rate, unemployment rate, median age, etc.," said Carrigan.
There were several liquor store robberies in recent weeks in the county, according to sheriff's department records.
"Businesses that sell liquor are very frequent targets of robberies," said department spokesman Deputy Jason Ramos in an email. "They are structured in such a way that a robbery suspect can enter, obtain close proximity to the employees very quickly, commit the robbery and be on his way within a minute or two."
Neighborhoods may be hurting, but the alcohol industry is benefiting, said attorney Reichel. "They're thrilled they're running the medical-marijuana folks out of town." "These two industries are competitors," agreed Carrigan. More alcohol outlets on our neighborhood streets may get local tax collectors buzzed but Reichel and others argue the long-term effects will end up costing the state more than Big Alcohol can ever bring in.
In 2008, alcohol-industry watchdog Marin Institute released a study that estimated the costs of alcohol consumption in the state reaches more than $38 billion annually. Efforts to raise the tax on alcoholic beverages, which hasn't been lifted since 1991, have thus far failed, thanks in large part to heavy industry opposition.
"By and large, it's been very bad for the economy," Reichel said of the alcohol industry.
http://www.latitudenews.com/story/uk-pirate-top-question-in-obama-chat/
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs, such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced and widely used by those who desire to do so.
* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* The massive majority of people who use drugs do so recreationally - getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
* A small minority of people will always experience drug use as problematic.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement - even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* The involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Cocaine from Central America has been well documented by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the late journalist Gary Webb.
* It's not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste hundreds of billions of our money in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the prohibited drugs have ever done.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it's own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes, yet it has far higher use/addiction rates than most other countries.
* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.
* 2010 Reported Corporate Revenues:
Johnson & Johnson = $61.90 billion
??? Pfizer= $50.01 billion
??? GlaxoSmithKline = $45.83 billion
??? Novartis = $44.27
??? Sanofi-Aventis = $41.99 billion
??? AstraZeneca = $32.81 billion
??? Merck & Co. = $27.43 billion
??? Eli Lilly = $21.84 billion
??? Anheuser-Busch InBev (2007) = $16.70 billion
??? MillerCoors = $3.03 billion
??? Pabst = $0.50 billion
* As with torture, prohibition is a grievous crime against humanity. If you support it, or even simply tolerate it by looking the other way while others commit it, you are an accessory to a very serious moral transgression against humanity.
* The United States re-legalized certain drug use in 1933. The drug was alcohol, and the 21st amendment re-legalized its production, distribution and sale. Both alcohol consumption and violent crime dropped immediately as a result, and very soon after, the American economy climbed out of that same prohibition engendered abyss into which it had foolishly fallen.
Malcolm Kyle for President!
When you are the leader of our Country you are the leader of us all. Not just the part that you agree with. You don't have to agree with us, but flat out ignoring us says that you are no true Leader, merely another politician.
It makes OUR cause look bad and if I am on YOUR side you need to look intelligent, even if you have to fake it.
If ordinary Americans could grow a little marijuana in their own back yards, it would be about as valuable as home-grown tomatoes; it would put the criminals out of business and get them out of our neighborhoods.
Prohibition has triggered the worst crime wave in history.
* It has helped escalate the number of people on welfare who can't find employment due to their felony status.
* It has created a black market with massive incentives to hook both adults and children alike.
* It has made these substances widely available even in schools and prisons.
* It has escalated gang warfare beyond what was experienced in the days of alcohol bootlegging.
* It has created a prison-for-profit synergy with drug lords.
* It has helped remove many important civil liberties from the very citizens it falsely claims to represent.
* It has put previously unknown and contaminated drugs on the streets.
* It has grossly escalated Murder, Kidnapping, Extortion, Theft, Muggings and Burglaries.
* It has diverted scarce law-enforcement resources away from protecting citizens from the ever escalating violence against their person or property.
* It has overcrowded the courts and prisons, thus making it increasingly impossible to curtail the people who are hurting and terrorizing others.
* It has evolved local gangs into transnational enterprises with intricate power structures that reach into every corner of society, helping them control vast swaths of territory while gifting them with significant social and military resources.
Imagine if we were to chop down every single tree on the planet as a response to our failure to prevent tree-climbing accidents. That's what our misguided drug policy looks like. Isn't it time we all stood up and told the government we're tired of being beaten and jailed so that pharmaceutical companies can poison and kill us for obscene profits?
Prohibition Prevents Regulation : Legalize, Regulate and Tax!